


Helga:That Which Ends Us Is Our Cure

by TheAstronomer



Category: Taboo (TV 2017)
Genre: Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, James Delaney is not a nice man, Neither is Horace Delaney, Period Typical Attitudes, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 05:53:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17482406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomer/pseuds/TheAstronomer
Summary: James Delaney has some history with Helga Von Hinten. This is Helga's story of what that history is.





	Helga:That Which Ends Us Is Our Cure

Long before the nooks and crannies of London were familiar to Helga, she had learned that the city was no friend to strangers. Its streets led people into dark forests of poverty and hunger with no trail of breadcrumbs to show the way home. It was at once claustrophobic, an assault on the senses, closing in to devour the weakest, and a huge, ever-expanding animal, leaving its trail of shit and discarded bones behind it. Before Helga found her home in the Docks, she had been cast ashore like flotsam from Berlin; a girl with no more than the cheap clothes she stood in and an address scribbled on ragged parchment in her fist. She was to be a seamstress.  There was a need for seamstresses in London was there not? Or so her hard-faced aunt told her, who'd grudgingly raised her almost from birth and now packed her off out into the harsh world. But the address did not exist and there was no call for a girl who could not sew to become a seamstress. But a girl with smooth, white skin, a girl with soft hair and a softer mouth? There was a call for that.  

Fireships, jilts, drabs, mawkes, trulls, doxies, bunters, cracks – all names for prostitutes which Helga would become familiar with.  Her own name became nothing, meant nothing, to those who sought the use of her body: London’s poorest had nothing to sell but themselves in a city which was all about commerce and Helga was no different. Her passage to the crowded dock in the Pool of London via a small cargo ship was paid for in more than the coin given to the captain for her place and Helga first plied the trade of a whore with the ship's crew in the hold. On her knees amongst the pungent barrels of salted meat and brandy came the first hardening of Helga's young soul. Berlin was soon a faded memory.  

There was no-one to pray for Helga’s soul and she gave it up willingly for a new life; drifting amongst the twisting, stinking streets around Covent Garden, in competition with a hundred other whores who masqueraded as respectable theatre-goers or perhaps young ladies who were ‘lost’, new to London town; in fine dresses and hats, feather fans hiding their missing teeth and pox scarred cheeks in the doorways. Always seeking the help of passing gentlemen, the offer of a pint of wine and the whiff of decay about them. But Helga was too pragmatic for the coquetry and deceit required to attempt the life of a courtesan. To become a chorus girl or dancer in the theatre was also a ridiculous notion to Helga with her two left feet and guttural singing voice. She sought a base, a roof over her head, relative safety, rather than the hard scrabble to survive as a whore on the streets.  It was this which led her to Jeannie and the whorehouse by the Wapping docks - no more than a glorified wooden shack, really, squatting obscenely in a nearby street but close enough to the dockside to provide regular trade. It had the reputation of something of a safe haven amongst desperate girls lucky enough to pass muster with Jeannie herself.  Jeannie’s appraising eye travelled over Helga slowly, weighing up Helga’s worth as she stood famished and weak in the doorway. Until girls had passed Jeannie’s self-devised test, Helga would later learn, she was as hard to them as the scarred and pocked wooden door which barred the way to the brothel, regardless of what state they turned up in. Jeannie was still a businesswoman but once they gained admission to her small empire, girls were protected and looked after as both investments and human beings, which meant they were clothed, fed, and Jeannie would personally vet the punters – a sniff of oddness or whiff of violence and the unfortunate man might find himself missing some teeth if he was lucky, or at the bottom of the Thames if he was not. Courtesy of some ‘gentlemen’ Jeannie knew. 

Helga took her place amongst Jeannie’s girls and was given the surname ‘Von Hinten' to replace her own more prosaic Schmidt.  _From Behind_. A trademark position that allowed Helga to avoid looking at the sweating, contorted faces of her customers as much as possible. Regular money to spend on herself if she wished or to squirrel away as Helga preferred, her own future plans, still hazy and formless, but  _there._ Perhaps, Helga thought, she would marry one day.  Have her own home, nothing grand, but spick and span, even some rooms above her own business; a bakery maybe? Helga had a head for figures and Jeannie quickly made use of it, Helga helping her keep her accounts straight in the huge, tattered ledger filled with columns of spidery numbers. A steady flow of incomings and outgoings: besides what was given to the women, the main expenditure being alcohol and oysters... drunk customers were generous and oysters masked the odour of the business of a whorehouse. 

Although Helga did enjoy shucking oysters: slipping the sharp tip of the knife into the tightly closed shells and jiggling them open, the briny aroma hitting her nostrils almost instantly.  The two baskets which lay at her feet were equally full, one of empty shells, one with the shell’s slippery contents, ready to be added to a stew. The kitchen was her favourite place in the whorehouse. The only place where there was no sex, no men, only the homely, busy activity of any other respectable kitchen in London.  Jeannie insisted it was kept spotlessly clean.  So, it became a haven, where the girls would congregate to share food, to talk in low voices, to warm themselves before the hearth.  

It was a meditative state Helga was in, on this particular day, with her hands and fingers moving smoothly and deftly over the oysters, when Jeannie’s face appeared in the doorway of the kitchen where Helga squatted on a stool.  

‘Job for you, love.’  The expression on Jeannie’s face was strange, almost unreadable, which meant, Helga was more than aware, that there was clearly something to hide. It was the expression Jeannie reserved for customers at her whorehouse, not the girls, never the girls, who would always get a wink or a raised eyebrow to indicate what kind of man was waiting for them. 

‘Now?’ Helga stood up, stretching her spine out luxuriously, pushing her fists into the small of her back.  It was early in the day for customers. Jeannie ran a critical eye over her dress. 

‘Now.  Splash some water on your face and wash the smell of them oysters off your hands.’ 

Helga smiled, wiping her hands on a rag. 

‘But you always tell me oysters mask the smell of sex, Jeannie.’ 

‘I don’t want none of your lip, girl.  Do as you’re told.’ Jeannie’s mouth was a grim line and Helga nodded, moving towards the basin of water next to the sink.  A snaking tendril of anxiety, not quite fear but close, slithered across Helga’s spine.  

Still, it was curiosity which prevailed as Helga stepped into the ‘parlour’ as Jeannie called it - a small room furnished extravagantly compared to the more utilitarian bedrooms - to meet her next job.  Helga was rarely curious about the men who grunted and sweated between her legs, or shuddered above her as she worked their dicks with her mouth.   

‘Helga is my best girl, Mr Delaney,’ Jeannie was intoning as Helga sidled into the room. ‘Nice young German lass.’ 

‘I don’t give a fuck where she is from, is she clean?’ came the clipped reply. The recognised code for free from syphilis, the scourge of prostitutes and their users.  A tall man, with a long, hooked nose, slowly turned his eyes towards Helga.  Pale blue eyes, which flickered briefly over Helga’s form as though she was an insect. 

‘I am clean.’ Helga did not wait for Jeannie to reply.  ‘My customers must all wear their armour’.  Jeannie stood between Helga and the man, her normally imposing bulk somehow diminished by him; his obvious contempt, his fine understated clothing showing up Jeannie’s flashy, gawdy silks so that she looked almost ridiculous.  He was not the average customer who appeared in the whorehouse – normally drunken, swaying sailors or gruff soldiers, East India Company men sometimes. Jeannie was silent, strangely for her.

‘You speak English at least. Good. Armour indeed.” He gave a snort of nasty laughter. 

‘I am fluent,’ Helga took a step towards him. She knew she must move this transaction along in the wake of Jeannie’s odd reluctance to. ‘You like to talk before we do business?’ 

The man’s narrow face creased into a smirk, the smile of a private joke. 

‘Oh, my son is not much of a talker.  Are you James?’ 

The youth in the cadet uniform of the East India Company who had been lurking, unseen, behind his father shrugged one shoulder and stared out of the window, apparently uninterested in the exchange taking place.  Helga craned her neck to see him in the gloom. The expression on Jeannie's face was still troubled as Helga attempted her most gracious smile and said: ‘Words are not always necessary.’  Perhaps there was a smidgen of the coquet in her after all.  Confusingly, she wanted this boy’s attention. 

But as the father left, paying Jeannie in silence, and Helga took James Delaney towards one of the bedrooms, Jeannie laid an arm on Helga’s shoulder and whispered, ‘ _V_ _orsichtig_ _._..I know this one’s father of old.’ 

 _Careful._  That was a first.  A warning.   

Helga would come to realise later the extent of Jeannie’s regret at her actions that day. Always a protectress, Jeannie's shield had failed spectacularly when it came to the Delaneys. 


End file.
